Starting a new website or a blog can be an exciting event. You are probably brimming with ideas on different topics you would like to write. Thanks to the ever-moving speed of technology, you can start a website all on your own, by following a few simple steps.
But before you can publish your first post, the website needs to be ready. Once you choose a name for your site, it is time to decide on your web hosting provider. There are a dozen good companies and hundreds of bad ones.
When choosing your WordPress hosting company, going with the cheapest option is not the right strategy. Choosing the most expensive plan is equally useless. So before you choose a hosting company, here are the key things you should know.
- Reliability
Reliability is the most important criteria when choosing your WordPress hosting setup. Most good hosting providers have 99% uptime, which means their service is guaranteed to be down for less than 7.2 hours every month. Higher the reliability score, the better. Hosts like GreenGeeks boast of a 99.9% uptime. As a part of the reliability check if your host has a weekly or a daily backup of data. In case something goes wrong, it is important to have the latest good backup handy.
- Speed
Fast websites are good for business. Nowadays, the customers’ attention span has reduced to 2-5 seconds. So if your site loads slowly, you lost the customers even before it opened. Look for a website host who offers SSD hard drives. These drives are 10 times faster than the traditional hard drives and when paired with a CDN, they can make your website blazingly fast.
- Security
A good WordPress Hosting system will have redundant hardware solutions, proactive security scanning and other measures. It is also important for the host to ensure that one site going down does not affect the other sites on the same server, either because of unexpected load or malicious attacks. Some hosts have a container-based approach that allows them to set up each account in isolation from others. Check to see if your new web host has such facilities.
- Pricing
All the above points are important. But if the hosting price is too high, no one would want such a service. So look at the pricing structure of different hosts and see which one offers the best value for money.
Pro tip: Annual plans are often the cheapest and offer great value for money. If the calendar shows a holiday coming by, wait for a few days and use the holiday offer. This way, you can get the best WordPress hosting at a great deal.
We recommend you look at different offers from GreenGeeks, Bluehost, SiteGround and Hostgator. Some of these hosting companies offer a special deal for WordPress hosting. But if you plan to host more than one site soon, go for the package that allows multiple domain addon.
WordPress hosting is easy and effortless once you choose the right provider. We hope the above tips helped narrow your choices.